Savage mercies - mixed media art of Annette Messager

Now 50 years old, Annette Messager is one of a very few French woman artists to have shown extensively within and beyond her nation's borders over the last two decades. Her disquieting, idiosyncrattic and unabashedly female sensibility has continued to stand out in a Parisian scene more inclined toward consensual self-restraint. Among her first works were the 56 "Album Collections" (1972-73), each a compilation of photographs, drawings, handwritten texts or embroidered sentences. The notebooks are identified by short descriptive titles such as Mes depenses quotidiennes pendant un mois (My Daily Expenses during a Month), Mes moyens de protection (My Means of Protection) and Les enfants aux yeus rayes (The Children with Crossed-Out Eyes). In their relentless enemuration of elements selected from what may or may not be Messager's actual life, they are early evidence of her blend of disingenuousness, ironic domesticity and violence.

Black-and-white photographs of parts of the body have remained an almost constant component of Messager's work. Torn up, colored and spliced, they gave birth to the spooky "Chimeres" of 1982-84; greatly enlarged, they became the ground of fantastic landscapes and cabalistic signs in "Mes trophees" (1986-88). In "Mes petites effigies" (1988), photographs, printed down to the scale of ex-votos and individually framed, are juxtaposed with small toy animals, each attached to the wall above an inverted triangle composed of scribbled verbal fragments; similar pictures are hung--sometimes with fragments of handwritten texts--in impressive clusters to form "Mes voeux" (1988). Possessed by an omnivorous appetite for images, Messager has developed a sure eye for accumulation and repetition.

Last September, Messager's work, along with that of George Kuchar and Cindy Sherman, was shown in the reconfigured contemporary galleries of the Centre Pompidou, and she was one of five women (out of 51 artists) included in the approximately concurrent Biennale de Lyons, a show which is on the way to becoming the most important contemporary art exhibition in France. In a somewhat surprising departure from the 1991 Biennale (see A.i.4, Dec. '91), the curators Thierry Raspail and Marc Dachy successfully mixed equal parts historical and contemporary works under the title "Et tous, ils changent le monde" (And They All Change the World). Messager installed her three pieces in small noncontiguous rooms, all so darkened that they seemed removed from the flow of the exhibition. Her rooms were of a scale one expects in private homes but not in big international productions like the Biennale, which takes place in a magnificent 19th-century slaughterhouse.

The smallest room housed Le repos des pensionnaires, 1972. The "boarders" of the title, 65 small dead birds, are tenderly laid out in five rows on a folded white sheet placed in a large tabletop vitrine. They are swaddled in various pastel-colored garments knitted by the artist and reminiscent of homemade newborn finery once dear to petit bourgeois grandmothers. One feels a disturbing mix of tenderness and sadism at work here, and it's altogether natural to wonder who Idlled the birds and commissioned the taxidermist to give them their pathetic permanence. The quasi-scientific display of the little creatures runs counter to the crudely knit coverings hopelessly fashioned to keep them warm. Are these corpses the evidence of gleeful slaughter, or did Messager attempt to mend their deaths with the doubtful magic wrought by a labor of love? Ambivalence--whether, as here, between tenderness and violence or, more recently, between the familiar and the menacing--has remained central to Messager's practice.

The two other pieces she showed at Lyons and four of the five pieces she showed at Beaubourg incorporate animals that have been stuffed. Hers are familiar creatures, ones often met in farmyards, forests and folk tales, Messager seems to treat taxidermy and photography as interchangeable in their capacity to freeze living things for eternity and thus to give tangible form to the possessive grip of desire. Anonymes (1993), created specifically for the Biennale, consists of 21 stuffed birds and two squirrels, most of them hovering slightly above our heads, each animal impaled atop its own skinny steel rod anchored in a rough cone of unfired clay. Messager tore the heads off a like number of stuffed toys, often gouging out their eyes and noses, and then pulled the fabric skins over the heads of her mounted specimens. The hybrid creatures--a crow with Mickey Mouse's head, a squirrel half-become a rabbit--seem disconcertingly on the look-out, listening to our chatter, caught between the personae of menacing spies and anxious victims. Anonymes marks one of the first times Messager has worked away from the wall.

At Beaubourg, she installed three medium-sized pieces in the middle of the room; in each of them, various stuffed animals are sheltered within the translucent circular canopy of a mosquito net hung by its center and trailing out on the floor. In one, a hen and a duck, both white and both sporting black hoods with eye holes, huddle against each other. Here the differentiation of species, instead of being a natural wonder, seems a metaphor for a wrenching and unbridgeable estrangement, whether between the two protagonists, who may have only their masks in common, or between us and this arrested animal world, which we consume and appear to dominate.